Research shows boom ahead for cloud computing

Cloud computing has been the most exciting and disruptive force in the tech market in the last decade, and it's no longer an adjunct technology bolted onto a traditional infrastructure as a place to build a few customer-facing apps. The Forrester research firm predicts that it will continue to disrupt traditional computing models at least through 2020.

Cloud applications such as software-as-service (SaaS), business services and platforms like infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) now drive a full spectrum of end-to-end enterprise transformation.

The global public cloud market will be $146 billion in 2017, up from just $87 billion in 2015, and is growing faster than we predicted just two years ago, at a 22 percent compound annual growth rate.